
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
  "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
  <head>
    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
    <title>Introduction &#8212; PSA Crypto API 1.0.0 documentation</title>
    <link rel="stylesheet" href="../_static/alabaster.css" type="text/css" />
    <link rel="stylesheet" href="../_static/pygments.css" type="text/css" />
    <script type="text/javascript">
      var DOCUMENTATION_OPTIONS = {
        URL_ROOT:    '../',
        VERSION:     '1.0.0',
        COLLAPSE_INDEX: false,
        FILE_SUFFIX: '.html',
        HAS_SOURCE:  true,
        SOURCELINK_SUFFIX: '.txt'
      };
    </script>
    <script type="text/javascript" src="../_static/jquery.js"></script>
    <script type="text/javascript" src="../_static/underscore.js"></script>
    <script type="text/javascript" src="../_static/doctools.js"></script>
    <link rel="index" title="Index" href="../genindex.html" />
    <link rel="search" title="Search" href="../search.html" />
    <link rel="next" title="Design goals" href="goals.html" />
    <link rel="prev" title="PSA Cryptography API 1.0" href="../index.html" />
   
  <link rel="stylesheet" href="../_static/custom.css" type="text/css" />
  
  <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=0.9, maximum-scale=0.9" />

  </head>
  <body>
  

    <div class="document">
      <div class="documentwrapper">
        <div class="bodywrapper">
          <div class="body" role="main">
            
  <div class="section" id="introduction">
<h1>Introduction</h1>
<p>Arm’s Platform Security Architecture (PSA) is a holistic set of threat models,
security analyses, hardware and firmware architecture specifications, an
open source firmware reference implementation, and an independent evaluation
and certification scheme. PSA provides a recipe, based on
industry best practice, that allows security to be consistently designed in, at
both a hardware and firmware level.</p>
<p>The PSA Cryptographic API (Crypto API) described in this document is an
important PSA component that provides an interface to cryptographic operations
on resource-constrained devices. The interface is user-friendly, while still
providing access to the low-level primitives used in modern cryptography. It
does not require that the user has access to the key material. Instead, it uses
opaque key identifiers.</p>
<p>This document is part of the PSA family of specifications. It defines an
interface for cryptographic services, including cryptography primitives and a
key storage functionality.</p>
<p>This document includes:</p>
<ul class="simple">
<li>A <a class="reference internal" href="goals.html#design-goals"><span class="std std-ref">rationale</span></a> for the design.</li>
<li>A <a class="reference internal" href="functionality.html#functionality-overview"><span class="std std-ref">high-level overview of the functionality</span></a>
provided by the interface.</li>
<li>A <a class="reference internal" href="sample-arch.html#architectures"><span class="std std-ref">description of typical architectures</span></a> of
implementations for this specification.</li>
<li>General considerations <a class="reference internal" href="implementation.html#implementation-considerations"><span class="std std-ref">for implementers</span></a>
of this specification and <a class="reference internal" href="usage.html#usage-considerations"><span class="std std-ref">for applications</span></a> that
use the interface defined in this specification.</li>
<li>A <a class="reference internal" href="../api/library/index.html#api-reference"><span class="std std-ref">detailed definition</span></a> of the API.</li>
</ul>
<p>Companion documents will define <em>profiles</em> for this specification. A profile is
a minimum mandatory subset of the interface that a compliant implementation must
provide.</p>
</div>


          </div>
        </div>
      </div>
      <div class="sphinxsidebar" role="navigation" aria-label="main navigation">
        <div class="sphinxsidebarwrapper"><div class="relations">
<h3>Related Topics</h3>
<ul>
  <li><a href="../index.html">Documentation overview</a><ul>
      <li>Previous: <a href="../index.html" title="previous chapter">PSA Cryptography API 1.0</a></li>
      <li>Next: <a href="goals.html" title="next chapter">Design goals</a></li>
  </ul></li>
</ul>
</div>
  <div role="note" aria-label="source link">
    <h3>This Page</h3>
    <ul class="this-page-menu">
      <li><a href="../_sources/overview/intro.rst.txt"
            rel="nofollow">Show Source</a></li>
    </ul>
   </div>
<div id="searchbox" style="display: none" role="search">
  <h3>Quick search</h3>
    <form class="search" action="../search.html" method="get">
      <div><input type="text" name="q" /></div>
      <div><input type="submit" value="Go" /></div>
      <input type="hidden" name="check_keywords" value="yes" />
      <input type="hidden" name="area" value="default" />
    </form>
</div>
<script type="text/javascript">$('#searchbox').show(0);</script>
        </div>
      </div>
      <div class="clearer"></div>
    </div>
    <div class="footer">
      &copy; 2019-2020, Arm Limited or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
      
      |
      Powered by <a href="http://sphinx-doc.org/">Sphinx 1.6.7</a>
      &amp; <a href="https://github.com/bitprophet/alabaster">Alabaster 0.7.8</a>
      
      |
      <a href="../_sources/overview/intro.rst.txt"
          rel="nofollow">Page source</a>
    </div>

    

    
  </body>
</html>